BOOK EXCERPT They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us Hanif Abdurraqib Two Dollar Radio

There is something about closeness to the hood that makes it more appealing. To be black, and not from the places that some in America imagine All Black People to be from can be interesting, particularly if you live close, or on the border of that space. In the suburb that bordered my decidedly less suburban neighborhood, there was a black kid or two who would bike the extra blocks into our area, where the houses weren’t as big or well-kept. Where the grass was dried and brown, or sometimes there was none at all. The idea was a brief escape, before returning back to the comforts of one’s own squalor. I have never imagined this as somehow less black. Not then, and certainly not now, when I am geographically removed from any hood I held close by miles, and yet still consider myself to be not severed from the cultural roots that I gained there.

I do not know what it is that makes a person real, but I imagine it is in the way they can convince you of the things they have not done. It’s a lie we tell ourselves, especially when it comes to our entertainment: we claim we want the real story, told straight, from someone who has actually lived it. That can sell, of course, but only when the living is spectacular. When there is some universal emotion to latch onto. Heartbreak sells, longing sells, desire sells. Violence sells, but mostly when it is a myth. Something invented and then expanded on by the person painting the picture.

In a barbershop tucked into the only black corner of West Haven, Connecticut, on the week before Migos release Culture, their hotly anticipated second studio album, there is a battle raging about authenticity. My barber, always unafraid to run, sword drawn, into a verbal battle about rap music, is yelling. “They’re from the suburbs!” he exclaims. “They rapping about all this trap shit and they ain’t never even been to the trap!”

.Two Dollar Radio

Migos, a rap group consisting of the rappers Offset, Takeoff, and Quavo, made their name by hustling. Legend has it that in North Atlanta clubs in 2012, they would pay DJs in whatever money they could gather from their parents and have the DJs spin songs from their first mixtape, Juug Season. The strategy worked, eventually making them North Atlanta’s most prominent party-starters. Their 2013 song “Versace” got a co-sign and remix from Drake, catapulting them directly into rap stardom. Musically, they’re more clever and fun than naturally gifted. They’re Future disciples, in some ways, as most Atlanta rappers of their era are, though they run a bit more adjacent to his timeline than some of their younger peers. They are also one of the last rap groups of the past decade to sell records. There is no defined leader of the group, though they all have roles: Quavo is the group’s glue, largely due to his ear for melody and ability to pick up the slack on a hook. Offset is the most pure MC, the one who seems to have most studied rappers before him. Takeoff is the group’s personality, making up for what he lacks in rapping by providing more thrilling aesthetics. Culture is the album that is set to be the group’s coronation. The first single, “Bad and Boujee,” is the country’s number one song. It’s being sung in trap houses and in minivans. They have entered into the realm of many rap acts who have had number one songs in recent months: fascination in the suburbs. And in the hood, a gentle resentment.

The thing that most people don’t know about Johnny Cash is that he never spent any real time in prison. A few nights here and there, sure. But he never did any hard time the way that his narratives suggest a relationship with not just prisons, but the minds of people inside. It was all tied to country music’s outlaw image, something that Cash was a natural fit for in the early stages of his career. In 1951, while serving in West Germany for the Air Force, Johnny Cash saw the movie Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison. In the black and white movie, prisoners in Folsom Prison attempt to revolt against the cruel and ruthless prison warden. The warden’s assistant, in attempts to work toward reforming the prison and making it gentler, is eventually forced out. The movie ends in a riot, where prisoners are beaten, bloodied, and left for dead. The central question of the movie is the one that is still asked today: Is prison simply a place of repeated dehumanization and punishment? Or is it a place where personal change can happen?

Johnny Cash wrote the line “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” in 1954. He recalls coming up with the line after sitting with a pen in his hand and thinking up the worst reason for a person to kill another person. The movie about Folsom still pulled at him, the moral dilemma he felt about punishment pulling him to think up sins so bad they could be deserving of the small hell that prison puts you through. Cash was writing into what he imagined prison life to be, even though, at the time, he was mostly interested in gospel songs. When he first auditioned at Sun Studios, he sang “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In,” and the story goes that Sam Phillips told him to go home and sin some more until he could come back with a song that could be sold. When looked at through that history, Johnny Cash, a persona from the ’50s until he died, makes sense. If the sins don’t come to you naturally, you seek them out. You chase them, let them consume you, and the ones you can’t touch, you write about like you’ve lived them.

Cash recorded “Folsom Prison Blues” in 1955, but the song didn’t have its signature moment until May of 1968, when Cash released the live album At Folsom Prison, to the excitement of his record label, which needed him to get back on track. By 1968, the popularity that Cash had built up in the late ’50s and early ’60s had started to fade, in large part because of the addiction to drugs Cash acquired. The romantic outlaw image he built during the time was fueled, in part, by a growing addiction to amphetamines and barbiturates, which he first began using to stay awake during tours. It gave birth to a frantic creative output at first, but then burned out, leaving Cash searching for a new direction in the process. When he played at Folsom, he opened his set with “Folsom Prison Blues.” The prisoners there were instructed not to cheer at any language in Cash’s set that could have been critical of prison life or guards. When he let out the line about shooting a man in Reno, the crowd of inmates was largely silent, afraid to respond. On the record, in post-production, the producer added cheering.

In the mirror, if you look hard enough, you still don't see yourself as the world sees you.

The week that Culture drops, I speed out to see Migos play a surprise East Coast show and Offset is making his hands into a machine gun while spitting a rapid-fire shooting sound into the microphone. A banner behind the group reads “NAWF ATLANTA,” a small tribute to where they are from. Where they are actually from is Lawrenceville, Georgia, a sleepy suburb just outside of Atlanta’s northern outskirts. The kind of place that requires you to name the biggest city it’s near when speaking to strangers. Culture is everything the hype promised it to be, and more. It is engaging, fun, and full of songs that could be hits, but that also don’t sacrifice Migos’ roots as a group interested in the club anthem. They have perfected what they’ve always been able to do fairly well, pulling together a handful of jumbled sounds from various musical elements and condensing them into something catchy in three minutes.

When people bring up the fact that Migos doesn’t hail from Atlanta proper, it’s signaling some larger criticism about the type of black people allowed to talk about certain types of things. This is odd, because there is so little to be had in the way of knowledge about their immediate upbringing. They went to a decent high school; Quavo was the school’s star quarterback until he dropped out to focus on rapping. Their proximity to Atlanta’s street culture afforded them a knowledge of its movements and a language with which to build narratives that sound true, in many ways. They are doing what music has done for years, but what rap’s insistence on the idea of realness punishes. They are packaging what sells to people who don’t know better, or people who know better but don’t mind a gentle lie while the bass floods a room.

In 2015, two months after a fight erupted at a Migos concert leaving six concertgoers stabbed, the group and 12 members of the entourage were arrested at Georgia Southern University for felony possession of narcotics and for carrying a loaded gun on campus. While Quavo and Takeoff were released on bond two days later, Offset remained in custody, with no bond, due to a previous criminal history. The following month, Offset attacked a fellow inmate, causing the inmate severe injury, and inciting a prison riot where prisoners fought each other until guards intervened. The incident was captured on prison security cameras in black and white. It was, some would say, like a scene from a movie.

This is what is supposed to make you real, of course. Some blood on the hands you create the music about killing with. The drugs you might have once sold, resting in your pockets. Offset was eventually released on a plea deal in December of 2015, after eight months in custody. The group’s songs don’t sound any different than they did before he went in. They aren’t rougher, or more complex and nuanced. The members of Migos are what they are, and what they’ve always been. Like Johnny Cash in the middle of the ’60s, they spent time getting too close to the fire. It is hard to build a myth so large without eventually becoming part of it.

Rap is the genre of music that least allows for its artists to comfortably revel in fiction, even though all of us know we are watching a performance. So much music is made by someone steeped in persona, building a digestible image. Because of rap’s roots, and because so many people who saw it at the start are still alive to turn a critical eye toward it, it comes under fire for turning away from what feels real. Additionally, when black people singing songs about guns and drugs make it to number one in a country where black people are arrested and killed for guns or drugs or less than that, it can feel a bit like life as spectacle is more protected than life as a fully lived experience. I understand these things and also say that we’ve allowed the rappers we grew up with to grow up and still rap about selling drugs with platinum records and sold out tours at their backs, but a suburban zip code is where we draw the line, as if growing up all kinds of black in all kinds of ways doesn’t carry its own unique and varied weight. As if, in the mirror, if you look hard enough, you still don’t see yourself as the world sees you.

There are few sins greater than the ones we commit against ourselves in the name of others.

Culture went to number one on the charts and was released to critical acclaim. It is the album that will do what it was meant to do: make Migos a household name, much to the dismay of my barber, who wishes they didn’t feel so fake. But Migos are true to themselves, more than most of their direct peers. Yes, the stories are outlandish and there is the eye-roll that comes with some of the content I come across as I age. But the songs they make are all still with the club in mind. Songs that can be played at the end of a long work week, bass-heavy anthems with catchy choruses that fit into every mouth in the room with ease. I’m less interested in what happens in the hood you’re from and I’m more interested in how you can honor that place, especially for people who might not know its history. Migos, more than anything, are still North Atlanta’s party starters; now it’s the rest of the world that’s catching on.

Johnny Cash wore black for entire decades. There was never a performance in his life where he didn’t cloak himself in at least some black. He claimed it as a symbol of rebellion; first against a country establishment with singers covered in rhinestones, and then against the hypocrites and in solidarity with the sinners. Johnny Cash, when it was all said and done, finally had enough sins. Real ones, too. Not all sinning ends with blood, which I think he learned too late, after he’d already racked up enough of the big ones to write songs that sold. There’s a lesson in that, for those who might want what’s real to be tied to what ill one can do to another person. There are few sins greater than the ones we commit against ourselves in the name of others. The things that push us further away from who we are, and closer to the image people demand.

In his final and most iconic music video, for his cover of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt,” Johnny Cash sits at the head of a table covered in food and riches. It is all very Christ-like. The video was filmed as a race against time, with the 71-year-old Cash declining in health and uncomfortable in the unseasonably cold Nashville weather. The director, Mark Romanek, decided to use the music video as an opportunity to be candid about the state of Cash’s health. It is a video filled with humanizing regret and heartbreak. Clips of Cash’s earlier career moments juxtaposed with footage of cracked platinum records and an abandoned museum that once bore his name, his longtime wife June, looking at him with both adoration and concern. In a story I read once, Romanek recounts the video’s most powerful and unscripted moment. At the end, Cash picks up a glass of wine and spills it all over the feast sitting in front of him at the table before forcefully putting the glass down. Everyone in the room began crying, Romanek said. Cash sat still, looking out of a window, unblinking. Despite wanting to be a man of deeper evil, surviving himself and all of his demons.

June died three months after the video was filmed. Johnny died four months later. He was buried next to her in a black coffin.

Back on stage in New York, Offset yells to the crowd. Something about how good it is to make it out of where they are from alive. The word “from” hangs in the air. The lights fade to black.

Excerpted from Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017)